IBM Deskstar IC35l060AVER07-0 broke down. please help!

[jvax]

Hi everyone,
I have an IBM Deskstar IC35l060AVER07-0 that I purchased two years
ago. I was using it as a slave drive mainly to store data. It had one
big partition occupying all the space there is and no OS installed.
The drive worked fine untill one day when my computer took a long
while to boot, the drive was making a sequence of four quick
head-moving kind of noise, seperated by almost one second between each
sequence, for like 15 minutes. Then when it finally booted, the OS
installed on my master drive recognized but could not access this
drive anymore. I tried scandisking and defragmenting it but nothing
worked whatsoever. Whenever I tried to access the partition through
explorer or command prompt, the drive starts doing the same noise for
a few minutes then nothing happens, as if I had not double-clicked the
drive letter at all.
I downloaded a diagnostic tool called Drive Fitness Test from the
website, which allows you to create a boot floppy to diagnose the
drive. Then I put the failed drive as master alone on another pc and
tried booting to the DFT floppy disk but, although the BIOS reconized
the drive, the screen didn't go past the drive detecting and RAM
checking and thus not allowing me to boot to the floppy disk. The
drive made the same noise again at the pc started up.
I have no idea what is wrong with it and I'd appreciate if someone
could give any suggestion as to what I can do next to save my data.
Thank you in advance.

 

[Rod Speed]

I have an IBM Deskstar IC35l060AVER07-0 that I purchased two years
ago. I was using it as a slave drive mainly to store data. It had one
big partition occupying all the space there is and no OS installed.
The drive worked fine untill one day when my computer took a long
while to boot, the drive was making a sequence of four quick
head-moving kind of noise, seperated by almost one second between each
sequence, for like 15 minutes. Then when it finally booted, the OS
installed on my master drive recognized but could not access this
drive anymore. I tried scandisking and defragmenting it but nothing
worked whatsoever. Whenever I tried to access the partition through
explorer or command prompt, the drive starts doing the same noise for
a few minutes then nothing happens, as if I had not double-clicked the
drive letter at all.

I downloaded a diagnostic tool called Drive Fitness Test from the
website, which allows you to create a boot floppy to diagnose the
drive. Then I put the failed drive as master alone on another pc and
tried booting to the DFT floppy disk but, although the BIOS reconized
the drive, the screen didn't go past the drive detecting and RAM
checking and thus not allowing me to boot to the floppy disk. The
drive made the same noise again at the pc started up.
I have no idea what is wrong with it

Its just another IBM 60GXP family drive thats died.

and I'd appreciate if someone could give any suggestion
as to what I can do next to save my data.

You could use professional data recovery, but you'd
better be sitting down when they tell you the price.

 

[Svend Olaf Mikkelsen]

Hi everyone,
I have an IBM Deskstar IC35l060AVER07-0 that I purchased two years
ago. I was using it as a slave drive mainly to store data. It had one
big partition occupying all the space there is and no OS installed.
The drive worked fine untill one day when my computer took a long
while to boot, the drive was making a sequence of four quick
head-moving kind of noise, seperated by almost one second between each
sequence, for like 15 minutes. Then when it finally booted, the OS
installed on my master drive recognized but could not access this
drive anymore. I tried scandisking and defragmenting it but nothing
worked whatsoever. Whenever I tried to access the partition through
explorer or command prompt, the drive starts doing the same noise for
a few minutes then nothing happens, as if I had not double-clicked the
drive letter at all.
I downloaded a diagnostic tool called Drive Fitness Test from the
website, which allows you to create a boot floppy to diagnose the
drive. Then I put the failed drive as master alone on another pc and
tried booting to the DFT floppy disk but, although the BIOS reconized
the drive, the screen didn't go past the drive detecting and RAM
checking and thus not allowing me to boot to the floppy disk. The
drive made the same noise again at the pc started up.
I have no idea what is wrong with it and I'd appreciate if someone
could give any suggestion as to what I can do next to save my data.
Thank you in advance.

One from a number of different strategies with different costs would
be this:

Leave the problem disk powered down.

Buy a new disk larger than the problem disk, and insert the new disk
in a working system.

Do using Findpart from my page:

findpart tables fp.txt

and mail me the file fp.txt.

The purpose of this is to prepare the new disk for a sector by sector
copy, which we do not know yet if is possible.

Another strategy could involve that the problem disk is examined
first, but better be ready to copy data in the moment it can be read.